電撃デイジー

DENGEKI DAISY

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
16
RELEASE
December 24, 2013
CHAPTERS
80

DESCRIPTION

After orphan Teru Kurebayashi loses her beloved older brother, she finds solace in the messages she exchanges with DAISY, an enigmatic figure who can only be reached through the cell phone her brother left her. Meanwhile, mysterious Tasuku Kurosaki always seems to be around whenever Teru needs help. Could DAISY be a lot closer than Teru thinks?

One day at school, Teru accidentally breaks a window and agrees to pay for it by helping Kurosaki with chores around school. Kurosaki is an impossible taskmaster though, and he also seems to be hiding something important from Teru...

(Source: Viz Media)

Included one-shot:

Volume 16: Hetakuso Cupid (The Hopeless Cupid)

CAST

Tasuku Kurosaki
Teru Kurebayashi
Souichirou Kurebayashi
Riko Onizuka
Akira
Masuda
Haruka Sawaguchi
Kazumasa Andou
Kiyoshi Hasegawa
Chiharu Mori
Masumi Takeda
Tetsuya Arai
Rena Ichinose

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

Nura7
80/100
This certainly goes beyond the typical sweet shoujo romance. Are you up for hacking into it..? - Ah, the pun.
So, Dengeki Daisy. I have to mention that we speak of the "hidden identity" tag here, and I love it!! In my personal opinion, DD is probably the classic in genre when it comes to hidden identity combined with an intelligent, more than average, male lead. So, onto the review now!

Plot: I would describe DD as a heart-warming manga with well-thought comedy. Really, the comedy is good! Before anything, I just want to say that I dislike shoujo sweetness. Despite the fact, that I have a lot of titles listed on my profile under Romance, do not get fooled though - I do not read too sweet titles! Ungh. Okay, I have read such but. Ungh. Anyway, if I had to compare DD's "sweetness" to some other title, it would probably be Kaichou wa Maid-Sama!. For some reason the atmosphere is kind of comparable. The story is about a very intelligent male lead who is a hacker. That's very right, something rather unusual. There aren't many titles that involve hacking out there. So, the plot is not that much into the hacking world, do not worry - no backdoor's, no injections, no DDoS attacks etc. Rather, the plot focuses on the hard choices one can face in life, it focuses on how much it is important for a person to be kind, to be protective but also to be forgiving. I have to say that the favorite part of mine in the plot is the fact that the male lead, Kurosaki Tasuku, hides his hacker identity and the fact that he always backs up the female lead. One interesting side note, as I speak Japanese, the part in his name, Tasuku, even though the kanji character for it is not the same but phonetically it is the same as the word/verb "to help/rescue". Isn't it cool?! ;D Anyway, I would rate the title with an 8 out of 10.

Characters' Design: The characters' design, at first, is nothing memorable because the manga starts up rather light, as a comedy. But the development is rather obvious later on, when the manga switches from that silly-dilly-willie Dengeki Daisy style to a very intense romantic plot. Oh, did I mention the age gap? Ho-ho-ho. We get a hot, intelligent and mature male lead ...I would hit the 9 out of 10 button! But the female lead, indeed she was also well-developed to suit Kurosaki. Still, she felt somewhat weak. Or maybe I am too much of a fan of strong female leads...? Okay, maybe someone might argue on that one. Because she was portrayed as a person who went through a lot...but boy. Still, I saw her as a weak character, no idea why. Certainly, she wasn't annoying like many female leads in shoujo genre. However, I think she could be more developed on the "display of her maturity" side. I get it, I get it - she is just a high-school girl, but the plot suggests that she is rather mature. And because of the female part, unfortunately I would end up rating the characters' design in total as 8/10. But, psst. Kurosaki's intelligence is hot as heck.

Art Style: Yup, not gonna lie. I liked the male's design. Well, what? I am into guys - what do you expect me to rate? XDD Okay, okay. Let's be serious. The art is not so clean. Some panels are obvious, that the manga-ka was in rush. But can you blame? I can't imagine working that, to be honest. Overall, the art style itself is well-developed. I have seen rather shocking drawings in the manga world, the proportions can be wrong and bad etc. However, in DD we get rather correct proportions, well, not perfect but still! Hence, I will rate it with an 8 out of 10.
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LassOfGloucester
90/100
I wish this incredible romance crime-thriller hybrid was not an age-gap so I could freely recommend it to more people.
I've only started to get much deeper into the shojo community, and they have been giving me a ton of recommendations for series I likely would have never heard of otherwise. One of the series I see recommended the most is Queen's Quality by Kyousuke Motomi, whose prequel QQ Sweeper I have read and highly enjoyed. I have also seen a few people recommend the subject of today's review, Dengeki Daisy. I'll admit that I was a bit hesitant going into this for reasons I'll get into in a minute, but I ultimately ended up loving it to the point where I can say it's one of my favorite shojos.

Teru Kurebayashi is an impoverished high school student whose genius programmer older brother Soichirou passed away from illness. Before he died, he gave her a cellphone with the email address of "Daisy", who he tells her will always listen to her and protect her and who she can freely confide in. In the present day, Teru is now super close to Daisy and communicates with him every day, seeing him as her hero. One day, she ends up breaking a window in her school, which worries her as she is broke. When she goes back to her classroom, she confesses her misdeed to Tasuku Kurosaki, the school's brash and crude janitor. He makes her become his servant of sorts to pay off her debt, and the two have a rather antagonistic relationship. Little does Teru know, this rude man is actually her hero Daisy, which is also his codename as an infamous hacker. And that's just the tip of the iceberg in regards to the secrets her brother has left behind.

Before I can gush about this series, I have to get the elephant in the room out of the way: This is an age-gap manga. Age gaps are a subset of the romance genre that is highly divisive for very understandable reasons. I'll admit that there is fair number of age gap series I actually enjoy, although I do have my limits (If one party raised the other it is a hard pass from me). With Dengeki Daisy, I feel like the series's positive aspects outweigh this stipulation, although I do feel they could have just easily set it in college instead of high school and very little would change. It would also eliminate some of the more uncomfy jokes/moments that I didn't particularly enjoy.

Much of this manga centers around the two leads, so it's fortunate that they are both very interesting to follow. Teru is a very sweet and upbeat person who cares very deeply, but she also doesn't want people to know when she's hurting and pretends that she's fine. She starts to open up more about her feelings as the series goes on and gets a bigger support network (Expanding from just Daisy and her friends at school to include her brother's previous friends from his job). Kurosaki himself starts off as quite a bit of an ass, to the point where I wouldn't blame people for being turned off by the series. However, it quickly becomes clear that his behavior largely stems from guilt over various actions in his past, as well as a desire to prevent Teru from learning that he is Daisy. As he and Teru grow closer, he genuinely starts treating her better and their relationship becomes less antagonistic and more sweet. They have their fair share of sweet romantic moments throughout the whole series, although it's not quite as prominent compared to several other shojo romances.

DD has a great supporting cast as well. My favorite is probably student council president Rena Ichinose, who starts off as a somewhat classist mean girl, but it quickly becomes clear there's quite a bit more to her. She is lonely and desperately wants to be loved, which often leads to her dating guys who aren't the best for her. She befriends Teru and her friends, which helps her find the support she needs. I also enjoy Soichirou's previous coworkers/Kurosaki's current friends; Masuda, Riko, and Ando. The moments where they just get to hang out with our two leads are honestly some of my favorite moments in the series, and it's clear that despite the occasional bickering they clearly consider themselves as close as family.

"Dengeki" roughly translates to "electric", which in the case of this series refers to hacking, where the crime-thriller aspect of this series kicks in. I'm not entirely sure how accurate this series's portrayal of hacking is since I'm not super familiar with real life hacking, but it's something I don't see in shojo manga super often and I think it really helps set it apart. There's quite a few tense moments involving hacking and Kurosaki using his abilities, and I'll admit that the crime aspect wasn't something I was expecting coming in but it was something I highly enjoyed reading. We quickly learn that Daisy is not just Teru's protector but also his alias as a highly feared hacker, and he was not exactly the best person prior to meeting Soichirou. Atoning for past actions and forgiveness are prominent aspects of this series. While Kurosaki's friends clearly value him, and while it largely relevant to Kurosaki reckoning with his past actions there are some other times it pops up as well, although it is very spoilery.

The final arc of this series centers around rescuing Akira, a troubled young man who was more or less trained in a lab to be a genius, from a plot to kill him. An old video reveals that both Kurosaki's father and his mentor Midorikawa cared deeply for the boy, and wanted to give him a normal life. In the present day however Akira has largely been a menace to our heroes, whose actions include forcibly stealing Teru's first kiss and attacking her in an elevator, as well as participating in a plan involving unleashing Kurosaki's biggest past regreat, the Jack Frost virus, out into the world. Teru admits that she does not really have a desire to save him despite the aforementioned video, as she has had nothing but miserable experiences with her. The narrative never demonizes her for having these thoughts, and that is something I really appreciate. We all have dark thoughts like this, but they do not fully represent us or make us bad people. It is nice to see a manga illustrate that. She ultimately does help save him and even befriends him, but it's clear that his past transgressions won't be glossed over and that he's only being given a second chance because he's had basically nothing resembling a normal life and therefore is kind of emotionally stunted.

This smack dab in between Beast Master and QQ Sweeper, and the quality of Kyousuke Motomi's art reflects this. The art improves remarkably as it goes on, with the character's hair and faces especially seeing improvement. It's not my favorite art style but it more than does it's job.

Dengeki Daisy is a unique series with an interesting and eventful overarching story and a great cast of characters. The whole age gap thing makes me reluctant to heartily recommend it (Especially since I feel it could have easily been avoided). If you can look past that though, it is more than worth it. I'm more than excited to dive into Queen's Quality in the future, to see if it will rival this for me, as QQ Sweeper already shows that it has the potential to.
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